RIYL: Kenna, Muse, The Killers
The press release for Quiet Geist, the new album from Northeastern electronic pop quartet Herra Terra, dared to name-check two big D’s that will get us to instinctively request a review copy like a Pavlovian dog: Depeche, and Duran. Silly us. We’ve seen this before, it’s almost never accurate, and as it turns out, it wasn’t accurate here, either. But in their defense, that’s probably because they knew that comparing it to Kenna’s New Sacred Cow would just leave people scratching their heads.
The funny thing is, we’ve heard quite a few artists lately who have taken inspiration from Kenna’s first album, the joke being that no one bought the record, but everyone seems to have heard it. And we’d bet dollars to donuts that Herra Terra could play the album start to finish at their next Halloween show, if leadoff track “Ejection Seats” is any indication. The songs are better arranged than they are written, which is not to say the songs are poor; it’s just that the music doesn’t stand above the nifty shifts in tempo or the slow builds, both of which anchor “You Were the Accelerator.” There is also the matter of singer John Paul Tonelli’s voice; It’s too muscular for the kind of music the band plays. That might sound like quibbling, but show us the last synth-driven band with a butch singer. Still, there is potential here. When the songwriting catches up with the band’s sense of atmospherics, they could be dangerous. (The Mylene Sheath 2010)
Herra Terra MySpace page
Click to buy Quiet Geist from Amazon
